This is both my personal learning project and my contribution in the struggle to confront the ongoing Republican/ libertarian assault on rational science and constructive learning, as manifested in their malicious strategic Attacks on Science ~ A collection of articles, scientific resources, plus my own essays and indepth critique of various presentations from unidirectional-skeptics ~ Hopefully a resource for the busy, yet discerning, student who's concerned about the health of our Earth

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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Open Letter to E&E News reporter Scott Waldman" Global? What global?

The past two days I've been catching up on the latest internet climate science faux-scandal, the John Bates affair. Fortunately enough has been written about it,see the preceding post for those details, that I won't rehash it here. What I do want to rehash is how easily communicators and reporters fall into the contrarians script without even recognizing it. My case in point is an otherwise good article written by Energy and Environment News reporter Scott Waldman. Reading the offending sentence I felt so irritated I sat down to write him an email that blossomed beyond first intentions and that I want to share since this blog is all about trying to provoke some thought, perhaps even a little soul searching.

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Dear Mr. Waldman,

I read your article “'Whistleblower' says protocol was breached but no data fraud”

( http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060049630 ) with much interest, but when I got to the section “Bates: Be careful of bias.” You wrote, "For many years, climate scientists were puzzled by an apparent plateau in global temperatures. …”

What the heck? Global SURFACE temperatures are NOT "global temperatures”!! Why are you repeating that contrarian meme? It was global surface temperatures that seems to "pause" although that was never true either since record temps kept happening. The best that can honestly be said is that the rate of increase had apparently slowed. If I’m being inaccurate please call me on it.

Besides, that 'apparent pause [sic] in Global SURFACE Temperatures, excluded the rapidly warming poles and some other less significant areas of our planet’s surface. Here again, if I'm mistaken on that point, someone please correct me.

"Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends." Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way - 2014 see comments.

Authorsebruary 2014

I'm not out to be a jerk here. I am trying to press a critically important but overly overlooked communication failure.Why don't you communicators include a reminder that it's the atmospheric insulation doing the actual heavy lifting on this Manmade Global Warming experiment we are running?

CO2 is our atmosphere's insulation regulator. For a million years its fluctuated from 180 ppm to 280ppm, a couple times almost 300 ppm before dropping back to ~180 ppm. It took a hundred thousand years for the cycle to repeat itself. 100 ppm was all it took to make the difference between the world we know and ice sheets covering our continents.

Now in a matter of a century and a half we have cranked that Atmospheric Insulation Regulator up to 400 ppm. That CO2 and other greenhouse gases do their insulation thing 24/7/365.25, no hiatus for those little molecules and photons of energy. It’s criminal to continue ignoring that fundamental reality for the sake of arguing over tiny differences in the estimated temperature figure.

All the rest is accounting! We live on a large complex planet with an atmosphere, land masses, a cryosphere, and oceans that hold 90% of our climate system’s heat. Measuring the heat flowing between these systems is exceedingly difficult and expensive. It’s no wonder that the effort is a non-stop learning process. It can’t be expected to tell us everything, immediately and with absolute accuracy. Demanding that expectation is a dishonest political tactic that goes way under reported.

How about a little more light on that bias which is founded on an absolutist faith-based world view that is intellectually worse than childish - its autistic. But its also fortified by economic political powers and a PR machine that beats all. People who apparently couldn't care less about honestly learning, or about the health of our planet, or the future we are leaving our children - avarice and power is as far as their mental horizons reach.

They have been very successful at creating a public perception that climate scientists can not be trusted, based on nothing but false and malicious innuendo and red-flag phraseology. That tactic needs to be confronted head on.

Stop allowing dishonest manipulators to own the script. How about working harder to convey an appreciation of what our global heat and moisture distribution engine is all about in a manner that connects with the under educated?

The science communication and news community needs to do more to highlight and confront the issue of the Republican's acceptance of factual lying and slander.

The article “Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community” just appeared in Global Environmental Change. The article is authored by me and Naomi Oreskes, James S. Risbey, Ben R. Newell, and Michael Smithson.

We initiate our argument with the known fact that vested interests and political agents have long opposed political or regulatory action in response to climate change by appealing to scientific uncertainty. We know from earlier work that uncertainty is no cause for inaction—on the contrary, greater scientific uncertainty should make us worry more, not less, about the potential consequences of climate change. Alas, those actual scientific implications are often inverted in public discourse where uncertainty often invites wishful thinking and hence inaction. In this new article, we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible to uncertainty-based argumentation, even when scientists recognize those arguments as false and are actively rebutting them. …

I thank Elizabeth Kent for making the effort to respond to my questions and taking the time to share some papers I should have been familiar with, but alas I am just a lay-person doing this in my spare time. I don't pretend to have the horsepower to keep up with publications. Then again some like this first one I recall seeing, but promptly forgot about it.

"Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends." Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way - 2014.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract

A review of uncertainty in in situ measurements and data sets of sea surface temperatureJohn J Kennedy, Jan 2014http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013RG000434/full

Another thing the malicious contrarian crowd always ignores is that temperature adjustments are accompanied by detail explanations. - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/

You know a constant refrain from the GOP (in their concerted attack on rational science) is that scientists are not to be trusted. Yet, every time I deal with them and receive responses to my inquires, I find the individuals helpful, honest and very conservative with their statements (to a fault from my Earth-centric perspective - though that's only because an industry has been set up to distort and misrepresent everything they write or say.).

If Republic's possessed a shred of intellectual integrity and sense of fair play and constructive learning - that would not be an issue,

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES

11/29/2016 I started this blog to debate climate science contrarians, I've done my part, they, the intellectual cowards for their part have run off and hide within their hermetically sealed echo chambers, safe to continue broadcasting more stupidity mixed with anger and hostility rather than constructive learning.

Now this horrendous election. Its changed everything and this blog, not sure where it's going, eventually I need to start another one, one less intent on futility reaching out for what ain't there and more focused on presenting a different perspective for its own sake, and to hell with the rest of it, it's too heart breaking.

I see Dec 19th as a key date. If there isn't serious focused engagement of the public in numbers that surprise everyone, well the oligarch will have their way with us.

Americans need to let Trump know from the gitgo, we do not approve of his con job and he better not get too crazy because he's earned zero good faith or honeymoon considerations. We shall see.

{edited 12/11/2014}

I know there are too many typos, what can I say, eyes aren't what they were, I get rushed, and always did have a thing with transposing…{well, I also hated high school "english" classes... bad call that one.}. Doing the best I can with what I got. Embarrassing though it is, it's better than doing nothing. Besides, it's the issues and reasoning that we should be worrying about.

Though I'm in my own little world here, I'm also constantly learning and evolving and do get occasional feedback and when I reread stuff and find errors or omissions or garbage, I fix it. If it's major I'll acknowledge it with an 'edited' note, minor stuff I don't bother.

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I hardly keep track of Anthony's latest antics (besides, with Sou on the job why bother - can't beat her insights). It's just me over here and I have more important things to do with my precious hours - still now that Anthony's luster has been wearing thin he's put his energy into discovering and honing new fresh faces to carry on the public show of the Republican/Libertarian strategic attack on science.

He seems to have transitioned into a ring-leader, perhaps mentor/coach would be better, producer? At least that's how Mr. Steele and his antics of the past year has gotten me to think about it. So in that regard this blog remains about WUWT's brand of thinking and logic and my struggle to understand the anatomy of the fraud they've perpetrated against mankind. {December 2014}

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ok, now some recommended websites:

This blog was started in April 2013 and is written by an actual scientist so it has a refreshingly serious objective air to it, plus he does a good clear job of explaining complex issues.

Tamino, an acknowledged statistical/mathematical expert of the highest order, at Open Mind also does an excellent job of holding Anthony’s feet to the fire with clearly explained facts and math. Check it out:http://tamino.wordpress.com~ ~ ~

And of course, there is the excellent, most up to date internet depository of climate studies and information for the non-expert public.

Then there's RealClimate.org the scientist's commentary site. Run by working climate scientists intended to help the interested public and journalists sort through the complexities of the climatology. They provide "quick response to developing stories and provide the context" that is too often missing from public media's depiction. {But, you better be serious and have some real science education/understanding under your belt if you want to keep up.}

I remember back in da day, good websites/blogs were few and far between. But over the past years that's been changing to the point that it's impossible to keep up with them all. Here's an incomplete, and long overdue addition to my above list: